It seems self-explanatory to me, but I can try to reword: it means that there are “obstacles” on the board (i.e. the coins, if this is how you choose to identify the pre-determined locations/intersections this way) that prevent stones to be placed where these obstacles lie.
I suppose the word that is throwing you off is “intersections”? By intersections, I mean the discrete locations on the board where stones can normally be placed.
Put simply, before the game you choose some points on the board to put a coin or otherwise mark. And for the rest of the game they act similar to the edge of the board. They’re not worth any points and can’t be captured and reduce the liberties of adjacent stones for both players.
Before starting we decide that we cannot play on some points on the qipan. To help remember we put a coin there.
thanks!
oh, but which points to put on?
(The players.)
the idea seems nice, but how difficult would it be to implement?. if implementation isn’t a big problem i definitly want to try it.
I have been working at the Wikipedia entry of the Go variants page, here is the current formulation of the rules I end up with. Feel free to send suggestions!
In Coin Go, a stone cannot be played on certain intersections of the board by either player. A coin may be placed on these intersections as a visual aid. Stones adjacent to a coin are limited to 3 liberties (the fourth one being occupied by the coin).
There are different ways to determine intersections occupied by coins:
Intersections are chosen (randomly or not) at the beginning of the game before either player takes a turn. A possible alternative is players take turns placing coins on the board.
An even number of coins is split between both players. The game begins with no coins on the board. Players may use a turn to place a coin on the board. A possible alternative is to allow spending a coin to remove a coin from the board.
(The two methods above may also be combined)
Coins may not be captured through liberty shortage. For scoring, coins do not contribute to territory. Normal scoring rules apply.
Since playing as Black has the potential of being a significant advantage in this variant, players may use the “Pie rule”[18] to determine who plays which color:
- Player A plays Black’s first move.
- Player B decides whether to be Black or White for the remainder of the game.
Essentially the same basic idea was previously proposed in another thread (see Random Gaps + Pie Rule), where they already played a few test games of this variant. @shinuito even created a tool for producing board positions with “holes”: https://shinuito.github.io/9x9board.html which is helpful for generating images to share while playing pilot games. See the other thread for more details.
I think it is way too premature to write this into a Wikipedia page. Topics have to attain a certain degree of notability before they should be documented in Wikipedia. It is not a place to simply post new ideas or conduct original research. I expect that editors might summarily delete such content. For the variations where coins can be “spent” during the course of the game, I don’t think even any test games have been played.
A better place to post such things would be Sensei’s Library.
That’s fair feedback, I will try to add it to Sensei’s lib. Thanks!
Edit: here is the Sensei’s wiki page: Coin Go at Sensei's Library
